The Visitor (artist Tony Coleman) – Strange Stories from the Mist text story

Bessie Bunter

Plain as Pearl (artist Juliana Buch)

Cut-Glass Crystal (artist Tony Coleman)

Running Rosie Lee (artist José Casanovas)

The Loneliest Girl in the World (artist Jaume Rumeu)

In the previous entry we profiled the Tammy that abolishes the Cover Girls and the logo that Tammy had used since her first issue. So now we take a step back and take a look at the issue that was the last to use them. So what did the Cover Girls do for their swansong? As you can see, they had a very hair-raising experience!

Of course the issue has a preview of the new-look Tammy that will be launched the following issue. It starts off with the “great news” blurb, and it is definitely much better news than saying the comic will be merging with another next issue.

After an absence of several years, Jed and Gert finally return to the pages of Bella. They have fallen on such evil days after Jed gets injured that they’re squatting, in debt, and unable to resume their window cleaning business. Bella feels so sorry for them despite the cruelties they inflicted on her in the past that she helps to revive their business. Will this be the beginning of Bella having improved relations with them though, or will they go back to the Jed and Gert of old? And there is still the matter of how Bella is going to get back into gymnastics.

This is the last issue to have the Misty text stories, which were revived during the merger. It’s a cautionary tale about not messing with blood pacts, especially when they’re sworn on the Bible.

Bessie Bunter makes one of the intermittent appearances she has been making ever since Misty joined Tammy. Bessie is so determined to go on a camping trip because it’s at an apple orchard that she lies about the weather forecast (stormy) and the state of Miss Stackpole’s tent (ripped). Of course Miss Stackpole discovers the truth on the trip, not to mention all the apples Bessie stashed in her tent. Then she and Bessie meet a lion after straying into a safari park and end up in a tree. Meanwhile, Wee Sue gets chased on the beach twice after a couple of mishaps, but it works out well in the end.

“The Loneliest Girl in the World” reaches its penultimate episode. Thank goodness it is for Karen, because she’s just about at the end of her rope with all these crazy goings-on that now go completely bonkers all around her. She’s discovering that everything and everyone around her is just one great big fake – even the forest and its wildlife. Finally, Karen emerges somewhere that at least looks genuine, but it looks like nothing on Earth – oh golly, could that be it?

At the school’s 200th anniversary celebrations, the school snobs, who have always had it in for “Running Rosie Lee”, recreate the Boston Tea Party by throwing Mr Lee’s tea into the school swimming pool to spite Rosie. But Rosie’s revenge is really surprising. Instead of the American Revolution she’s launching the French Revolution against the snobs. Is she going to send the snobs to the guillotine or something?

In “Dulcie Wears the Dunce’s Hat” (because of the dirty tricks Annie Archer keeps playing on her in class, not because she really is useless at schoolwork), Dulcie is swotting hard for exams so she can get rid of the hat. Little does Dulcie know her hard swotting is a waste of time, because Annie is framing her for ruining the exam papers. For some reason this episode got switched with the one in the next issue, so we don’t see what happens when the school discovers the ruined exam papers for two weeks.

This week’s episode of “Plain as Pearl” shows more and more of what vanity, spoiling and pretty looks have done to make Claire a mean, selfish type and why Pearl is so right to keep her modelling job a secret from her. But at the end of the episode Claire could discover it when she drops in to Pearl’s friend Kathy’s house while Pearl is trying on her modelling clothes.

In “Cut-Glass Crystal”, Crystal’s mother and grandmother arrive to take her away from Pitedge. Dad is furious about it. That’s pretty rich of him, considering how hard he has been on Crystal. Crystal has considerable reason to leave Pitedge because she has been such a misfit there, but now there are loyalties to consider. So what will happen?

This issue of Tammy is a milestone in Tammy’s history. Tammy does away with the logo she has used ever since her first issue (with some tweaks) in favour of one with a more modern and heavier typeset. She still has the Misty logo underneath, though.

Tammy also does away with the Cover Girls, who have graced her cover ever since Sandie merged with Tammy. So that’s John Richardson out of a job. The Tammy covers are using a style similar to the one that Jinty used in her early years before she started using story panels: put the opening page of a story on the cover. However, in this case it was one or two of the first panels, used as splash panels on the whole cover, as opposed to resizing the whole of the first page to fit on the cover. So the story still ran for three pages inside. For the most part it was Bella, as is the case here. Putting Bella directly on the cover must have attracted even more readers to her and to Tammy. Not to mention seeing Bella in full colour. Now and then Bella was on hiatus, so Tammy used other serials on the cover. This style was used for Tammy’s covers throughout 1981 and the Jinty merger. It ended with the 10 July 1982 issue.

The new look Tammy also has some new stories to match. The first is a new Bella story. Bella is helping Uncle Jed and Aunt Gert revive their window cleaning business after Jed’s back injury put it out of action and they have been reduced to squatting. So far Jed and Gert have not mistreated Bella the way they used to, but trouble comes in another form. A gang of hooligans blackmail Bella into one of their schemes, threatening to report her relatives for squatting. Then the scheme goes badly wrong when they are attacked by guard dogs.

Tammy also begins another adaptation, that of “The Black Stallion”. But it is the new serial “Sandy and Steve” that is the most striking, and must have caught readers by a most delightful surprise. For the first time, Tammy is running a boyfriend serial. This was really radical for the time, because at that stage girls’ comics did not run boyfriend serials. Boys and boyfriends, when they appeared, were on the periphery. It’s no wonder Sandy became so popular in Tammy. She spawned two sequels, the last of which had her finally having a boyfriend that she and her father could both agree upon. For the first story, though, Dad does not approve of Sandy dating Steve because he’s a real snob and regards Steve as “riff-raff”. So Dad begins his interfering habit of pairing Sandy up with boys that he deems suitable. Unfortunately the boy’s class and business/political connections with the boy’s parents are what dictate Dad’s choices of ‘suitable’ boyfriends for Sandy. He has no consideration for Sandy’s tastes or wishes. Heaven forbid this man ever goes into the dating agency business!

Also new is Tammy’s “Chatterbox” letters page, which includes a pen friends section.

Three serials end this week, which would open up space for more new serials to match the new-look Tammy. In “Running Rosie Lee” (abbreviated to “Rosie Lee” in the issue) the tea theme that’s been running throughout the story ends with it running up against its rival – coffee. “Cut-Glass Crystal” decides to stay on in her father’s hometown of Pitedge despite all the difficulties she has been having there.

The ending for “The Loneliest Girl in the World” is one of the most memorable ever in girls’ comics and still crops up in comic book discussions. In fact, the entry has been updated to include a scan of the episode below. Karen Chalmers finally learns the human race destroyed itself in a worldwide nuclear war and she is the last human. She begs the aliens who rescued her and tried to hide the truth from her to send her back in time before the war so she can die with her parents instead. Moreover, Karen goes back without losing her memory of what happened in the story (as happened in “The Human Zoo”), so she knows what is coming to her and her parents. The story looks like it was originally written for Misty.

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Something very odd happened with this week’s issue of “Dulcie Wears the Dunce’s Hat”: the episodes for this week and last week got swapped. Anyway, in the episode we do get, spiteful Annie Archer takes her tricks up the notch that so many troublemakers do, and it’s the notch that always advances the story to its climax and ultimately, its resolution. Annie is no longer content with getting kicks out keeping Dulcie in the dunce’s hat by sabotaging her schoolwork. After Dulcie unknowingly puts Annie’s nose out of joint in this episode she’s out to destroy Dulcie altogether.

Juliana Buch has started on Sandy while still drawing another of Tammy’s popular serials, “Plain as Pearl”. This could be a sign that Pearl is beginning to reach the end. Pearl Kent has taken a job as a model to raise the money to send her sick mother on holiday. However she has to keep it secret from her foster family or the daughter Claire will be jealous and start spitefully interfering. Now this makes a change, having the protagonist actually anticipating a thing like this instead of the usual format of the antagonist causing trouble for the protagonist behind her back. The episode opens with Pearl having a close call with Claire, but now there’s another problem – Mum has had such a serious relapse and is so unresponsive to treatment that she may never be fit enough for the holiday.